‘Operation Storm’

Croatia: A Nation Forged in War

Yale University Press (paper; to be published in November), 338 pp., $16.00 (paper)

To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

Random House, 408 pp., $27.95

Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood

by Barbara Demick, photographs by John Costello

Andrews and McMeel, 182 pp., $19.95

Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation

by Laura Silber, by Allan Little

Penguin, 403 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Standing motionless among their hulking war machines like statues in the dark, 200,000 Croat soldiers dropped their cigarettes, then clambered into tanks and trucks and armored personnel carriers and, in a sudden earsplitting eruption of grating gears, pushed forward into Serb-held Krajina. Thus began, before dawn on August 4, 1995, “Operation Storm.” Within hours Croat commanders knew their code name had been well chosen; for everywhere Serb soldiers—40,000 of them, with 400 tanks—retreated, melting away in the rising August sun. Within little more than a day the red-and-white checkerboard flag of Croatia was flying once more over the castle high above the Krajina’s “capital” of Knin.

Clogging highways, meantime, more than 150,000 Serbs clinging to tractors or cars or horse-drawn carts in caravans twenty or thirty or forty miles long moved over the border into Bosnia in one great wave. The chaotic exodus was easily the largest single instance of “ethnic cleansing” of the Yugoslav war. Meantime a triumphant Franjo Tudjman, President of Croatia—who had publicly invited the Serbs to stay in their houses, assuring them their persons and property would be protected (if, that is, they had not been implicated in “war crimes”)—said of the Serbs, many of whose families had lived on and farmed Krajina land for hundreds of years:

They disappeared ignominiously, as if they had never populated this land. We urged them to stay, but they did not listen to us. Well then, bonvoyage!

As Tudjman spoke, Serb villages burned. In a cable to the State Department, a US diplomat described his drive though Knin a week after “Operation Storm” began:

The terrain quickly became a surreal mixture of burned or burning homes,…burned cars, overturned tractors,…castoff clothing and blankets…. Near Knin, virtually all [houses] had suffered some damage….

Croatian soldiers were ubiquitous…. Many were going house to house in mop-up operations. Others were resting, lounging, and drinking beer in the yards of the abandoned homes….

…Throughout Knin’s homes, food was on the tables, clothing was hanging on the lines, toys remained outside, and all of the ostensible signs of life remained, except for the presence of human beings.

The flames the US diplomat observed came not from combat, of which there had been very little, but from the main political tactic at the heart of “Operation Storm.” A week after the American diplomat drove through Knin, investigators on a Helsinki Federation Fact-Finding Mission reported they had found

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